Leonardo Lanzolla

Leonardo Lanzolla was born and trained in Turin, and has spent most of his working life painting a long way from it. He moved to the United States in 1984 and settled in Seattle two years later, where he still lives and works today.

He is self-taught, and the method is entirely his own. He starts without a plan, lets the paint move, and waits for a shape or a face to surface before he commits to it. What emerges are characters and creatures, half familiar and half invented, that seem to have arrived on the canvas on their own terms. He describes the process as a direct approach, unintentional by design, and he has been refining it for decades.

His references run from the Cobra group and art brut to Klee, Miró, Picasso, Dubuffet and Basquiat, with the Italian Transavanguardia and urban graffiti never far away. You can see all of it in the work without any single influence taking over. The colour is loose and confident, the drawing is quick, and the surfaces keep the record of how they were made.

He has exhibited regularly in Seattle, with solo shows at Gallery 110 in 2018 and at Home Street Bank Fremont and Anne Art and Frame Gallery Ballard in 2015, and he is a represented member of Gallery 110. His paintings are held in private collections in Seattle, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sun Valley, and his work has also been shown in France and Sweden.